Flint: Bottled Water Verses Rainwater

   It is very expensive to deliver bottled water to people’s homes. Rainwater is delivered quite regularly already. We, here at McDonald Philosophy, have been working on methods of rainwater collection. If a sufficient filter can be attached to any of seven models, rainwater can be collected even for drinking. But that we are not collecting rainwater for washing defies belief. In Bermuda, where the ground does not hold water any better than Americans hold new ideas, they have been collecting and drinking even roof rainwater for a century.

   Does everyone simply assume that rainwater is dirty? When we used lead in the gas, one might expect lead in the rainwater east and north of a city, but now the air is fairly clear in most places. And the water coming out of the pipes, where do we think that came from? And we think it best to first run it through the poisoned ground in Flint, then down the poisoned river and through the poisoned pipes, then try to filter it? We seem to have this image that water must be “treated” and made artificial by some government controlled process. And is bottled water tested, say, for plastic after it has sat in the sun? The challenge in inventing water collection systems is keeping the collection system clean, as roofs are exposed to bird droppings. If I leave mine out, I have to wash it good before a rain, usually washing it with well water. We have one model that folds up, so that it is covered, and unfolded before a rain. This, and my plastic and dowel on a frame model, I would have produced and delivered for sale in Flint, but there are no investors. One cannot do these things by oneself, especially if blacklisted and ostracized for having new ideas.

   With the method pictured on the Inventions page in the menu of this website, I have for nearly a year collected almost all my own drinking water. If I could afford to test it, I would, and if I could afford a sand and charcoal or graphite filter, I would have one. I use coffee filters, which work fine for the big stuff, But for the most part, my water is pristine, and leaves no film on the containers, as the well water does. That, too, we want to test, as no one has looked into the spread of poisons from Mount Salem under the ground toward Northville Township. And we watch collecting water when the wind blows from the south.

Flint Water Funds Run Dry: No Rainwater In Sight

Funds for bottled water will soon cease to flow, and Flint has still not figured out to stop relying on government and turn to rainwater, at least to supplement the leaden city water system. Rain barrels could have been providing much water for washing, but they are watching this go down the drain. Inventions for rainwater collection systems are ignored, or cycled here among a few fellow authors on WordPress, while entrepreneurs and fellow inventors play on Facebook, and Google just cannot seem to locate my website on any of the search engines. Seriously, can no one who wants to make things and make money, can no one see that it is possible to filter and collect rainwater for drinking, at half the trouble and expense of bottled water? Can no one see the possibilities for patents and inventions regarding water? Can no one see that it is possible to collect rainwater in a larger a way, for whole communities, and even to sell bottled rainwater, if it can be filtered and tested? The future use of these systems will only increase, while Flint and everyone else watches the rain water go through the poisoned ground, the poisoned rivers and poisoned pipes before they try to filter it. I can see these possibilities, and it is quite painful to watch Flint fumbling around with bottled water and new pipes while the rain flows down the drain. That is why my vice is libertarian cynicism. A bit of integrity in about five different offices and areas, and these problems would long ago have been moveing toward these obvious solutions.

Meanwhile the Trump fever does seem to have broken with his recent drop in the polls, after a continuous and meteoric rise. America may be seeing through the sham behind the curtain, and be on her way home to Kansas after all regardless. That is why The Wizard of Oz is the American Myth.

Dar Bass of Imagine Trash.org on NPR Stateside

The very day after I wrote about the Sheeny man, Stateside reviewed the Kent County Sustainable Business forum and Dar Bass, who is also connected to the Kent County Public Works. He has thought a bit about trash, and viewed what goes into landfills. They have focused on things like getting businesses to bunch their corrugated cardboard together so there is enough to bother with recycling. He notices how many returnable pop cans are thrown away. The balance is always the value of time and attention in our daily priorities, but Mr. Bass is full of good and worthwhile ideas. I wonder if he likes my idea for a sheeney man at Mount Salem and perhaps a store of reclaimed items- the sheeney man would make a fortune, though I would not want the job. The key is to have someone watch and remind people about hazardous house waste, stuff we do not want to be drinking down the river.

It is a shame that the yard waste collected is full of Chemlawn and roundup, so that it may be the last thing one would want to use on one’s garden. They might test for this and consider the wide ranging effects.

Wash, Rinse, Dry

I was maybe in my thirties or forties before I realized two things about cleaning that make our work more efficient. I was going to post it with the fifteen things about work on the ALK3R reblog, back a few posts, but this theme can justify its own blog, and I do not have much to say today. So, it is not smart to dip our dirty cleaning rag back into the soap water bucket. If we keep the wash water separate it lasts like ten times longer. So after one dips the rag in the soapy water, and washes the ditty surface, then you squeeze out the dirty water before dipping into the soapy water again. Then the rag takes on soapy water rather than gets dirt in the soupy water. Then you have a separate system for rinse, like a separate bucket and rag, and do the same with the rinse water, squeezing the dirty out into the drain and taking on only clean rinse water. Then, if one just lets the surface dry, the water leaves a residue, cause its only like 97% clean, So you have a third separate dry rag, and the surface is shiny. Wash, rinse, dry. After a while, the dry rag becomes the rinse rag, and the rinse rag becomes the washrag. I know this stuff is right, ’cause Mrs. Emrick would let me clean her bathroom, and would say I did it the best. She was 94, and maybe 91 when she said that.

Another great tip for cleaning is the painter’s five-in one (now they have like the seven in one). To wrap a rag around a five in one gives you a soft but sharp edge for cleaning cracks and lines that others have not got to. In painting, this system is great for wiping an error along a sharp lined edge. With errors, the rag is dry-wet-dry: First wipe wet paint with a dry rag, then a wet rag then a dry rag (I’ll just keep a rag that’s half wet and half dry, or a dry rag and a cup of water to dip it in). It is the same with spilled paint: first with a dustpan get the bulk, moving it toward the center of the spill instead of smearing it, then its dry-wet-dry, keeping the paint moving off the surface. This is to consider how the stuff your cleaning up flows. It may seem simple, but I figured this stuff out in my thirties, I think. So if the rag around the five in one is first dry, then damp, then dry, any errors can be made to vanish. Drier spots, ya just let em soak wet for fifteen minutes, then they come off, same as dirt when cleaning.

We used to joke that the test for applicant to a painting labor job is “What are the five uses of the five -in -one! Then for a raise, you gotta answer the seven uses of the seven-in-one!

 

Rainwater Testing

It is of course important to test rainwater, though we are too poor to do this ourselves. The fellow from Sydney, Australia found the rainwater there to be just fine even close to Sydney, but again, one wants to consider what is upwind. My sister plowed her garden south of my collector, and suddenly clay dust is collecting in the plastic, though most is separated due to the hole off center. We have the Mount Salem dump just two miles south. A couple weeks ago, I had a bad case of something, I am looking up Montazuma’s Revenge, and cryptosporillia. The Garage kitty is the most likely cause of cryptosporillia, though this can come from contaminated water. The second most likely, though, is that I have repeatedly got stuck with Maxwell House French Roast on sale that causes diahrea and painful gas, which is not good if one already has blocked intestines and prostate trouble!

I am using only a coffee filter on my rainwater, again due to extreme poverty. But the graphite filter that comes from California, just invented, does this thing get out the parasite that causes cryptosporillia? And are these things cleanable, by rinsing them out backwards, and affordable because they are re-usable? Devising a filter that lasts very long will be extremely difficult if it is not cleanable by rinsing.

Yet, even with these problems, rainwater is obviously incomparably superior to leaden Flint ground and tap water, or Ann Arbor dioxin water. I am still just beating my head against the wall that people do not understand the simplest ideas, and trying to find and persuade investors. Again, I have six or seven patentable rain and water inventions, but no money, because I am a thinker who works for free and not a shyster on the take at every turn, as one third of America seems to prefer.

Overflowing Rainwater for Drinking

I have more drinkable rainwater than I can store, and am thoroughly sick of the nay- sayers who just assume that one cannot drink rainwater, though I learn more from them than they learn from me. One must indeed be careful, but even bottled water has plastic leaching into it, and of course our city water and well water is now not safe. People assume this stuff is “purified,” but how do we even know that the bottles were not left in the sun in transport? And where does water come from? Oh first we’ll run it through the poisoned ground, then down the drain and into the river, then through the leaded pipes, oh but well coat these with shit, then we’ll filter it, then we’ll drink it! And call anyone crazy who does not drink this instead of filtering the rainwater!

Indeed, the ground once did filter the water, and there was not air pollution for the rain to catch on the way down. But I’m betting on the water this side of those pipes.

Indeed we want to test the rain, and indeed I cannot afford to do it. But precipitation is a purifying process, like distilling though not as good. Again, when one boils water, where do the bubbles come from? If you do not know this, shut up and listen! (And I have never asked yet and been answered correctly.) People assume that no one they know can think of anything new, or that if one were worth listening to they would already be rich. They even become quite mean, and I will forgive, but not forget that this has occurred.

How do you think people who do it on their own become rich? I know a guy, his grandmother turned down an early offer to buy stock (or was it an offer of marriage?)from Henry Ford. If it were obvious, as it is to me, they would indeed be doping it already, and again I am very impatient watching the people of Flint eat lead.

So, again, take a piece of plastic 6 x 10, roll the edges in dowels, attack these as with a staple gun, go to the corner of your fenced back yard, add three 2 x 4’s to make a frame (one for a leg, the other two to complete the rectangle made with the corner of the cyclone fence. Place a rock in the suspended plastic, and a hole a few inches off center. Suspend a filter in a funnel in an Absopure bottle with a trough under it, as I do, secured by bricks, or even just stretch a cloth over a five gallon bucket for a collector and filter. You will have gallons of drinking water every time it rains, except downwind from an operation polluting factory. Get a rain barrel for bathing and washing, hook it to your gutter, and if you like, wash you roof with the hose before a rain, or even spread clean plastic. We are working on products made of the most food-safe plastic, printable with a 3-D printer if it can handle 6 x 10, and a model that folds like a card table made of sheet metal. We will have them at the hardware store as soon as we find investors.

I have gallons right now stored in fruit, water and even washed out milk jugs, more water than I can use, delivered to my home for just the effort of collecting.

Water from Mexico: Trounce Trump on Economics

Say, before we close up those drug tunnels between the U. S. and Mexico, lets consider bringing water up to the parched Western deserts and and the thirsty farmlands of Southern California. On the BBC, they had a show called the Y factor with Mike Williams, and they considered many interesting points regarding the relation between the U. S. and Mexico, and that show gave me this idea. The show was about a number of things, including the recent change in the attitude of the Mexicans toward the U. S. now that Donney Trumpet has taken the Republican party, or one half of the Republican party, into tyrannic ideology. Many guest workers are going home, workers brought here by U. S. companies because of the Union sponsored disparity in wages. The Mexicans earn about 1/10 or 1/9 the wages in Mexico as they earn here, while conversely the cost of labor in the U. S. is just that much higher. This leaves enough incentive for the companies to go to the trouble of getting around the union-corrupted U. S. wages, just as the companies like to do their manufacturing overseas.

This too raises the issue of the supposed strength of Donney Trumpette regarding economics. He is opposed to NAFTA, the treaty which supposedly would create that giant sucking sound of jobs going out of the U. S. The net job loss is one of those partial view or short term views that, when one ignores the rest of the big picture, makes one meanness or another appear to be a necessary measure. The net job gain of the economic boom caused by neighbors engaging in mutually beneficial trade outweighed the loss of jobs in the narrow view by about ten to one. I still do not know, though, why Obama’s policy of saving the Michigan auto industry worked, though I admit that it did. I’ll have to work on that one, as I seem to be caught in some narrower view myself.

Not only were corrupt and criminally negligent GM executives allowing the ignition switch scandal, but they twice got the trend wrong. First that they were making huge SUV’s when the gas price went high, the were outdone by the smaller foreign cars. Then, remember, they started making all these stupid little electric cars that no one wants except, again, for some non-economic, environmental ideology reason, and that too has been a dramatic failure. Sometimes one wonders if a stupid giant is not just big enough to fail. The cost is in the bazillions, which I could have saved them sitting in my shed and holding up my thumb, or rather liking my finger and holding it up to see which way is the blowing of the wind. But I still do not understand why the bailout worked, and I give Barack mystical credit for the move: I may not have done that, and then we would really hear the giant sucking sound of jobs going overseas, following the industries that employ them.

Here is another thing I do not understand about economics. Remember that old patriotic economics of “Buy American?” There was an incentive to buy American products for its own sake, rather than the good of the products, and there is something right and something wrong about that opinion. Similarly, as my boss in painting hauled his Honda power washer up onto a deck in Birmingham (I apologize for taking a job from a needy Mexican when I ought be teaching (and would be if only I were the right gender, maybe I should switch to fit the economy!)), I wondered about foreign products. If a Honda power washer makes a free American craftsman more efficient, what is the net impact on the ecomony? I’ll bet it is 10 to 1 again.

So, I think that for mystical reasons friendship is more productive than meanness, and Donney Trumpette will prove wrong by a factor of ten to one regarding the economy. His short sighted or narrow viewed xenophobic policies make friendly cooperation impossible, and the economic impact of the human factor is, well, difficult for the econo-heads to measure. Politics is more than economics, by a factor of at least ten to one, just as politics is more than mathematics. And that, Mr. Koch brothers and scamway brothers, is why you have just destroyed the Republican party for all your good intentions, just as the economic governor we elected here in Michigan, though not criminal, has caused the Flint water crisis, and will cost our State by a factor of one hundred to one. Credit, though, to Mr Koch for waking up almost in time to recover the Republican party, and cut the pseudo-republican new voters adrift. These are the tyrannic many that form like a precipitate from our national sins, ripe for a demogogue. I do not know if it is going to matter when Hillary asks Donney the tough questions the other weak republican candidates failed to ask, because these voters cannot think and will not listen. “Never Trump” is a new movement, but this means civil war, because they cannot see to leave the Republican name behind and form a third party. We invite them to join the CLC, but they are way too good-looking for that, and cannot admit that the law against marijuana is unconstitutional, but will hold to their irrational conservatism while trying to get their water from the Great Lakes instead of Mexico, till their Enbrige beloved pipeline combines with the roadsalt to destroy one third of the world’s fresh water. For political advantage hey will not speak against Sodomy, just don’t smoke weed.

Philosophic Fish ?

“…For if someone should go to its surface or become winged and fly up, he’d leap up and take a look- just as fish here leap up out of the sea, and see what’s here, that’s also how someone might take a look at what’s there.”

Socrates, to Simmias in Plato’s Phaedo, (109e)

   My sister found this great invention on the internet, and has it in her fish and frog pond in the yard. It is a vase suspended on bricks, with water trapped because no air can get in to displace it. The fish just swim right in the bottom, and so do the frogs. I made sure an air bubble was also trapped, in case the frogs became confused and didn’t think to swim down to get out. Here, one of my six fish is viewing one of the frogs from a unique perspective. I wanted the fish to see what it’s like in the air-world. Socrates says: “For although we dwell in some hollow of the earth, we think we dwell up on topp of it, and we call the air “heaven, thinking that because the stars travel in it, it’s heaven…”

Translation by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage and Eric Salem

So you see, fish can provide a demonstration of Plato’s Allegory of the cave in drama, and are therefore philosophic! Having thus demonstrated my thesis, I leave you thus.

More Marvels of Water: Rainbow Spots

At one time in my life, I had never noticed rainbow spots in the clouds. Then I saw them from an airplane up above, and began to notice them more from the ground. These are like places where the rainbow painter has left touches of the colors, without the rest of the rainbow. They seem to happen especially when the weather is icy. Two days ago, from Dexter, we saw the evening sun in the west with sharp rainbow spots on both sides. From my shed last week, I saw the most amazing cloud with red, two clouds, a small one in front of a slightly large one, with red on the tops and blue and turquoise on the bottoms of both clouds. This goes on my list of new things I discover each year, a list I started when I saw that the shadows in a field are purple, as much or more than brown.

Drinking my snow water, I began to wonder about frozen clouds and what is happening when we collect water that falls out of the air because it froze into crystals. Why do the clouds not fall when they freeze, if clouds are like fog? How can they stay afloat when the temperature is below 32? The rainbow spots do seem to have something to do with ice crystals.

I am trying to devise a rain/snow collector that won’t blow away in the wind. I’ll try glass low to the ground, small enough to be manageable without breaking the thing. I need a cone shaped thing, so the water will go into a 5 gallon absopure jar. With glass, one might build a small fire on the downwind end of it, to melt a bunch of snow without bringing it inside. I’v been melting enough for drinking, but not for coffee too. Today I’ll put two pots of snow in the basement to see how long it takes it to melt.

On my window, I was watching the water turn to ice crystals through a slush stage, an intermediary stage clearly visible on the window between the frost and the dew. We think the mystery of life is related to the way frost takes the patterns that plants also take. The repetition of the gene and chromosome thing might arise through the repetition in the water crystal.